


Emperor With Benefits

by MaevesChild



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Broken Heart, Established Relationship, F/M, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition - Trespasser DLC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 16:35:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17512115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaevesChild/pseuds/MaevesChild
Summary: The Exalted Council came and with it phantoms, heartache and war.  Maybe not today, but there were storm clouds on the horizon.





	Emperor With Benefits

The first time was an accident.

That’s how they both coped with it, how they both left in the morning, sweat damp and embarrassed. It was bad enough the court knew that Briala was pulling his strings. How much worse would it be if they knew the elven mage Inquisitor was doing it as well? How much worse would it be for her, if they saw, if they knew she let Celene die for all the wrong reasons?

But it wasn’t like that. They both knew it wasn’t like that, but what else would the courtiers see? Power, intrigue and sex; they were always intertwined.

Thing is, it wasn’t about power or intrigue. Lavellan certainly had no interest in influencing the ridiculous politics of Orlais, beyond getting their support for the Inquisition. Briala would be far more adept at bending it to her will.

As for Gaspard, there were no benefits at all, only the threat of even more disgrace.

Yet after that battle in the Arbor Wilds, after Solas broke her heart, Kestral Lavellan found her meeting with Emperor Gaspard turn from a war council into something else entirely.

She should never have asked him to take off his mask.

She should never have kissed him.

It was the start of the most scandalous liaison since Briala and Celene. The worst part was there were no ulterior motives, just desire and passion. Despite being the Emperor of the Orlesian Empire and the Inquisitor, they were terrible at playing the Grand Game.

It wasn’t easy to find time to be together, but in the years following the defeat of Corypheus, as they tried to put the world back together, there were plenty of reasons for the leader of the Inquisition to petition the Emperor of Orlais.

_Everyone knew_ but as long as it didn’t change anything, it turned out that no one actually cared.

The Exalted Council came and with it phantoms, heartache and war. Maybe not today, but there were storm clouds on the horizon. Wounds that had long since begun to heal tore open.

She should have wanted to race through the Eluvian, to stop Solas, or even to help him depending on the way the wind was blowing. But when the mirror stopped shimmering and she knelt in the ruins of her heritage with only a strange tingling sensation where her arm used to be, the only thing she wanted was Gaspard.

Not the Emperor. She didn’t know him. She wanted the pale eyed, grey haired man who’d warmed her bed whenever he could for the last two years.

She loved Solas; she truly did, but he was a hazy dream. He wanted to end it all, her world, the games, a thousand years of human history. She didn’t blame him. He could only be what he was. Solas was more myth than man; a spirit of the Fade that would disappear in the dawn.

Gaspard was real, as mad as that was.

He was deliberately not at the council. After the conclave, there was even less reason to feel safe. She didn’t blame _him_ either. Gaspard was who he was too; a man raised on betrayal, on duplicity, on treachery right from his mother’s breast.

Afterwards, after the crisis was averted and the Inquisition folded into the Chantry, as the delegates from Ferelden returned home, after she said goodbye to Dorian and Varric and as most of the Inquisition’s remaining forces were marching back to Skyhold, Gaspard returned to the Winter Palace.

She had her own private room. He knew where it was.

Kestral was sitting at the window, the blue fading moonlight dancing over her fingers, the five she had left were cast from olive tan to grey pale in the faint light. The pale cornflower silk dressing gown she wore had no sleeves, but she tried not to look at her left arm, at the curiously smooth, scarless place where it simply ended. She still felt her missing forearm and fingers, but mercifully, her mind didn’t remember the eidolon pain of the lost anchor.

Her room overlooked the inner courtyard and garden where she once slaughtered a contingent of Venatori spies. It didn’t distress her and perhaps it should have. And once the thrill of the forbidden wore off, it made her sad. She was more than she’d ever thought she was going to be, and she grew up thinking she’d lead her clan one day. But she was still an elf in a land ruled by humans. She was sleeping with the worst of them. She was a dirty secret, perhaps worse than Briala had ever been.  _She_ didn’t really know what Celene was.

Kestral knew.

None of that mattered now. She was broken. She wanted familiar arms, a familiar voice. Everyone died eventually, but what was coming was something more than dying and she didn’t know how to stop it. She wanted to feel safe, feel that quiet comfort Solas could never give her.

Maybe Gaspard was a monster. So was she.

“It appears I missed all the fun,” Gaspard’s voice came from behind her. She didn’t hear the door slip open on intentionally silent hinges, but she didn’t flinch. He liked to startle her. It was a game, the sort they both enjoyed, but her heart wasn’t in it.

She heard the click of his mask being set on the table by the door. Her fingers flexed against the window sill. Leaves rustled in the garden below.

“Kestral?” The tone of his voice shifted from that beloved near laugh that so often bubbled underneath his words to something softer, disquiet.

She swiveled in her chair to glance at him over her right shoulder, her left side still hidden from view. She wondered if anyone told him.

Gaspard frowned. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” His hair had grown since she’d last seen him. Long enough to no longer stand up as stubble, but softly lay against the curve of his head. It looked like he hadn’t shaved in a few days.

Her eyes pricked with tears. She didn’t mean to, but this was the only place she was  _Kestral,_ not a myth herself. Here it was impossible to pretend. She stood up before she lost her nerve, turning to face him.  

He cocked his head, a faint smile appearing on the corner on his mouth before it dissolved into horror.

_Would he leave her now? Would she finally lose everything?_ Perhaps it was what she deserved.

“Andraste’s tears,” he muttered but instead of pulling away, he lurched towards her, his usual grace lost in his alacrity. His hands, warm and pampered but leathered from the hilt of a sword wrapped themselves around her arm. “What happened? Are you in pain?” His touch was more delicate than those big hands looked capable of.

Kestral shook her head. She tried to steady her voice when she spoke. “No, the anchor...when he took my arm and the anchor, he took that pain away.”

“He?” Gaspard canted his head. “Your elven apostate, then?”

She made a breathy noise, too sad to be a laugh. “He was never mine; I never knew him at all.” She pursed her lips, debating what to say. There was no way it could sound like sanity. The things she’d seen, the things he told her; not even Gaspard would believe her. She looked at the floor. “Once we’ve managed to confirm or disprove what he told me...but me to you? I don’t know. I think it was true. But when he left this time, I couldn’t follow. Not yet.”

“Ah.” Non-committal. The pressure of his hands lessened. “Shall I go as well?”

Her head snapped up. The tears won the battle, soaking through the gate of her lashes, spilling down over her face.

“Is it too much?” she asked. She held her voice steady. “Am I?”

Gaspard’s hand lifted from her shoulder, cupping the side of her face. “Never. But I won’t keep you from what will make you truly happy.” He smiled, sincere but sad. “This has,” he continued, “been a joy. Stolen moments of peace in these unending battles? Ah, you have given me more than all my striving and plotting and fighting ever did. It would be a poor reward for all you’ve done, to think you need stay here and humor politics when there’s your life to chase.” He ran his thumb over her cheekbone. “I owe you for my throne, even if it came with strings attached. You will have my support as long as I can give it. You have my word that I will continue to support the Inquisition, regardless of whether you share my bed. You need not be here out of obligation.”

“That’s not why I’m here.” They never spoke of why, or of tomorrow. They didn’t dare. “That was never why. I’ve always been here because I wanted to be.” She batted the tears off her face. “I could have followed him, perhaps. But I didn’t even try.” Her tear damp fingers curled around the side of his neck, pulling him closer. “I wanted to come  _home.”_

Before he could speak, before she could say more and ruin things, she pressed her lips to his.

This kiss, it was sliding between fresh but well-used linens, boots worn to a perfect fit with age, the remembered taste of strawberries in winter. It wasn’t the bitterness of Solas’s last kiss, words battering against the cold stone walls of her mind.

_I walk the dinan’shiral. There is only death on this journey._

Gaspard’s fingers slid into her gold hair, tangles she hadn’t the strength to brush away pulling against her scalp.

_I will never forget you._

A sob caught in her throat. Instead of surrendering to pain, she relaxed into Gaspard, into his stocky, decidedly human body. Her lips wandered to feel the rough scratch of his stubble. His skin tasted faintly of smoke, of vetiver cologne. He reminded her of no one but himself.

His arm wrapped around her back. It was too tight but exactly what she needed. She felt something in him now, something she’d never dared let herself before. But these open wounds Solas left behind made it too hard to keep her own mask on.

_Shall I go?_

Gaspard never left a battle unfought in his life. Not if he thought it was a battle that needed winning, not if he thought it was what he deserved. What was this then, this retreat even as she kissed him?

Kestral stopped, pulled away, her breath in ragged gasps, whether from the kiss or from her shattered heart, she couldn’t be sure. She waited for his eyes to open, pale and colorless. She looked at his face, really looked at him, knowing that this was a face no one really saw. Those masks, the ones they wore and the smiles underneath, both kept faces like this behind a veil as unknowable as the one Solas wanted to destroy.

Was it even a handsome face? Probably not. His jaw was too wide, his eyes were small and too light, age and miles and scars tore over his cheeks. Decades of battlefields and overindulgence wrote themselves into his skin. But there was that smart, wicked mouth, the one thing that was pretty and saved him from being only harsh angles.

The man inside that odd face, he was brilliant, without a doubt. But no amount of brilliance and persistence had saved him. In the end, he’d lost to politics and the greater good, even as he still sat on the throne. He had no heirs. His lineage was unlikely to continue.

This was just a man, a broken man, a failed man, one she wanted despite all the reasons not to. Perhaps most of all she wanted him because everything she ever thought she wanted broke her heart and this man, flawed as he was, put her back together entirely by accident.

He was the one who held her.

“We could die tomorrow,” Kestral said. “We could die tonight.” She smiled through tears. “Chances are, I’ll die out there; you’ll die out there somewhere, fighting, because that’s what we were meant for. But if I could pick a place to die  _and_ to live, it would be here. With you.”

Words weren’t Gaspard’s forte and they escaped him now. No one taught him to be honest. She wasn’t sure he even knew how to speak the truth, but she could see it in his worn, beloved face.

She kissed him again, soft on the generous curve of his mouth.

“Let’s hope we survive the night at least,  _Inquisitor,_ ” he finally managed.

She raised an eyebrow. “ _Inquisitor?”_

His smirk was wicked. She laughed. It felt like it had been a lifetime since she’d laughed and meant it.

“Time for an interrogation?”

“Orlais bends to your will.” He tried to keep a straight face but chuckled despite himself.

Kestral laughed again and with her right hand, pushed him until he shuffled backward and sat abruptly when his knees hit the edge of the bed. She couldn’t have moved him if he didn’t want to go, and despite his age, he didn’t lose his balance without far more effort from his opponent.

He didn’t need to tell her anything with words.

She knew what he meant.

 


End file.
